


Echolocation

by Amand_r



Category: DCU - Comicverse
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-18
Updated: 2010-11-18
Packaged: 2017-10-13 06:33:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/134064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amand_r/pseuds/Amand_r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They were supposed to be Batman and Robin, not Batman and sometimes, maybe, if everything is kosher and good, Robin, sorta, kinda.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Echolocation

**Author's Note:**

> In anycase, thanks to the good Rabbi, and to Tianyu who of course suggested all sorts of titles that I couldn't very well use, such as "Batman and the Uncomfortable Silence" and "Dear God Bruce Hit That Shit Up."
> 
> Disclaimer: DC owns them, I don't. Oh well. So I wrote this with Seal's "Love's Divine" on repeat. Erm. Yes. Well. I haven't written Batfic since I was fifteen. Wah!
> 
> Spoilers: Hush. This is pre-War Games, obviously. The time line makes my brain hurt like a hurting thing. Rating: PG maybe whatever. Gen-->slash, wah. I call it gash, but only because that sounded better than slen.

Batman is tall. Bruce isn't a tall as Batman is, Tim thinks, which makes no sense for very obvious reasons. But there it is, this observation, he realizes as they stand in the alley behind the PlayCo factory and wait for the cops. Batman doesn't move at all. It's as if he can't, not until he has a reason to, as if his whole reason for existing is this expedient capture and release that makes Tim wonder what it would be like to take Bruce fly fishing, since almost everything they catch ends up back in the wild eventually.

Tim has never been fly fishing either, and he has this feeling that if they did go he would end up trying to perfect his cast, while Bruce would be able to instinctually haul back and let the reel, well, fly.

He can't see Bruce knee deep in water that would take him away if he wasn't in reality something else underneath. In his more surreal moments, Tim thinks Bruce looks as if his skin will split and peel back to reveal black kevlar. Tim isn't sure when he became conflicted about what he would think on the day that Bruce Wayne finally disappears, but right now he's fairly sure that he'll be disappointed

"Do we really have to stay?" he says in a moment of impulsive indulgence. The answer is yes because if they hadn't needed to stay and keep an eye on the factory and the chemicals inside, hadn't needed to actually have a word with the investigator on the scene, they would have already left. In fact, Batman doesn't answer, because he knows that Tim has figured this out already.

With nothing else to do but think about fly fishing and possibly other natural sporting events (right now he's thinking of how precisely Alfred would bait a hook, and how Dick would end up getting tangled in Bruce's line), Tim turns his thoughts back to wondering if he'd be able to bait a hook.

Tim has this idea that somewhere in the bowels of Wayne Manor (though not in the bowels, the attic, which is the polar opposite of what lies below) there are reels upon reels of home movies, and that if he were to watch them he might actually see the real Bruce. What he's afraid of is that he'll see mini-Batman.

He's thought of this before, hell, he's talked about it before with Dick, on one of the many times when Batman leaves them to patrol together. For someone who is so desperate to be on his own, Dick finds reasons to come to Gotham: the city is quiet, he's following a lead, it's Thursday, he needs to borrow a cup of sugar. Sometimes Tim realizes that patrolling with Dick is the last thing that he should be doing, that he should be there for Bruce, for Batman, sort of, kind of, at least, that was the way it had started out.

When he lets Batman send him away, or rather when Batman sends him away, off to find Cass or Dick, when he's in town, he looks at the bike before he mounts it and thinks to himself that this isn't right, that it's supposed to be Batman and Robin, not Batman and sometimes, maybe, if everything is kosher and good, Robin, sorta, kinda. But then the bike is the bike, all reinforced fiberglass and throbbing engine between his legs, and Tim has one weakness and that is to go very very fast, and he is after all, sixteen.

When he lets Batman send him away, or rather when Batman sends him away, he and Dick crack some skulls, which is fun because Dick likes to talk. Sometimes he even sings numbers from Pinafore, because according to Dick, it's about duty. Tim is content to let Dick tie up everyone who needs to be tied up just a little too tightly, and then sometimes they take a breather over at 115th and Coriander, where the rooftop has a great view of the lower east park and they can see the trees frame the signal in the sky if they need to, or rather, they don't have to see it anymore because Oracle will grab them by the ear and issue their marching orders, since Batman answers the signal alone.

Tim misses the signal sort of for the same reason he forgets to turn his cell phone on.

On those nights when he and Dick take their break and have a snack up on the roof, they usually talk shop, and sometimes they talk about Cass or Dinah, because they like to talk about the girls, even though Barbara is off limits. It's safe, for the most part, and so very far from other lines of discussion that would probably end with a dangerous tumble off the rooftop for one of them.

Tim knows all too well about why he shouldn't bring up certain topics, and he even knows all of the answers to the questions he wants to ask, about Dick, about Bruce, about Batman and Robin and when it was less about doing what needed doing and more about two separate men who just happened to share the same patrol. He has to pick at scabs though, he has to ask Dick to discuss these things because asking Babs would just creep him out. In these moments, crouched on the roof and scarfing one of Dick's god awful Power Bars, he tries not to say much of anything that would give away his own agenda in the face of curiosity. Most of him knows that when he asks about Bruce, Dick will just give him a withering look from under the lenses and say something that Tim already knows, not because he knows Bruce, but because he can read the society pages as well as anyone else.

He doesn't ask how Dick worked with Batman, with Bruce, really, because he has all of that documented carefully, and every now and then he looks at the files, saved carefully behind many many safeguards and walls. Those videoclips and paper clippings don't tell him anything that he really secretly wants to know; they don't show anything other then the occasional hand on the shoulder.

Tim had to look up the definition of the word 'stymied' multiple times to ensure that he was correctly describing his situation.

But Dick is the person to ask, though he hadn't liked it the night before, when Tim had decided that sometimes the shortest distance between two points was a line, and that he shouldn't be looking for loopholes anymore.

"When you were Robin," he had said, knowing that Dick already knew where he was going with this, because he hadn't flipped his lenses down for a nice long heart to heart.

"When you were Robin," he had said again. This time he had wondered if he had to say it really. Because he really hadn't wanted to say it. In fact, on the off chance that he would be wrong, he certainly hadn't wanted to color their already slipsliding relationship (because Dick never forgot what he said about Bruce and Vesper, no he could never forget that, not really, no matter how much he smiles and ruffles Tim's hair). "When you and Batman were together," he finishes, making it a statement that wasn't a full sentence, but was because of the punctuation in his voice.

Dick had stood, pulled one arm in front of him with the other, and said, looking down at him. "Break's over. I'll meet you for debriefing."

That had been that, the last time. Tim had known at that moment that he was on the right track, because Dick, for all that he hides behind that domino, hides the wrong things in the right way, and the right things in the Bat way.

And when he had taken off from the roof himself, following the streetlights instead of Dick's path less well lit, he had known what Barbara meant when she whispered into the comm, "Be careful."

Sometimes Tim wonders what Bruce means when he says that Tim's a better detective than Dick. Well, he wonders how Bruce can say this to him and seemingly not realize just what Tim has figured out. If Batman has figured it out, he would definitely say something to him about it, because really, would he want to make Tim think that--

With nothing else to do but think about fly fishing and possibly other natural sporting events, Tim's a little stunned to believe that his line of thought was cast in these waters. It's been thirty seconds since he zoned out, and the police aren't anywhere closer than they were before.

Batman crosses his arms and rocks a bit on the balls of his feet, but that's all that he has to say on the matter Tim's broaching by yawning and lolling his head against the brick wall very deliberately. Batman could say so very many things: calm down, you keep dropping your left side, go home, stay to take care of this, double back on the warehouses by the river before you pack it in, save me, but he doesn't.

Tim likes to read a lot into Batman's behavior, mostly because it's what Bruce doesn't say that tells him what he's supposed to do, how he's supposed to move. Like tonight, in the factory, there had been a moment when he had fallen back a little, let some hack get too close to him with a knife, and he had thought for a second that he had gone too far, hit the wall. But then the wall behind him had moved and it had been Batman. It had been easy then to press his own back against Batman's in some sort of maneuver that resembled a Three Musketeers movie and feel the muscles through the suit and the cape, a ripple along his shoulders that had told him that Batman would move left next so that he could press back further to the right, and they had taken out the rest of these two dollar guards with a few well-placed kicks.

He likes those moments because that is as close to playing that Batman, that even Bruce will get, and Tim likes to think that it's Zorro coming to the fore there, that one last moment of enjoyment that Bruce ever got before a gun implanted a bat in his chest in a back alley not too far from where they are at this moment. Tim thinks the image of the birth of Batman resembles a black flower blooming in time-lapsed photography.

Batman's behavior means that he hasn't forgotten Tim, forgotten Robin, not really, not entirely.

So this had been one of those bizarro nights when he hadn't taken the bike, when he has come out in the car. They do this about three times a month, take the car together. Tim never gets to drive, but there's something right about the way the passenger seat curves just for him, as if he sits there every night. It's too easy to think that the car seat has been made for him, for Robin, when he and Dick and Jason were actually very differently shaped, really. Or maybe Tim, the world's second greatest detective, is inferring something that isn't there.

"If you're that tired, you should head in early," Batman says, which is a complete lie, since exhaustion is such a poor excuse for not completing patrol that the last time someone actually used it was when Dick was in this suit and had mono. Tim rolls his eyes and knows that Batman sees it behind the lenses, not because he can see through the lenses but because he just knows.

Bruce didn't used to be this omnipotent, really. There used to be lots of things he didn't know, and it was more fun back then, sorta kinda, though Tim had never taken advantage of Bruce's less keen observation like he should've at the time. Then again, Bruce had always let Tim do pretty much anything e wanted to -except put on the suit-let them all do whatever they wanted, after a fashion, and the only thing Tim can think of that might be remotely amusing would be to give Bruce a wet willie, which would be nigh impossible, and also? The kiss of death.

"I'm not tired," he says, and watches his breath rise in front of his face. "I'm slightly bored."

He doesn't bother to clarify any beyond that point, because the police arrive, and he assumes his 'aw shucks I'm just your friendly neighborhood Robin' face, something he's inherited from Jason and Dick and which makes the cops feel better, especially since the guy he works for is scary even when you're a good guy, or oh say, his partner. If Tim had been the first Robin, he would have acted differently from the start, but then he might have had to deal with the shorts, and really, he did it once, and it had sucked.

Some of the older beat cops tell a story about a Batman who once brought them hot coffee and donuts on Christmas Eve when they were out on patrol and it had been snowing. Tim is convinced that this is an urban legend, but some of him desperately wishes it to be true.

Batman lets Tim help the cops transfer their zip-tied goons to the paddywagon while he gives a report, showing them the canisters of reagent and the balloon valves and explaining to them how the Haz-Mat team should load up the hookups without releasing the valves at the wrong time.

When they're away and stopped up at the Wildemark Building for a quick overlook of the Gotham red light district that Steph calls "Whoreyville", he glances over the edge of the building, one foot up on the ledge, his toes never crossing over the precipice. Dick likes to stand on the edge with his toes curled over the corners of the bricks; Tim is sure that of all of the Bat kids, he is the least willing to jump on and off of things. Whether or not this is a useful trait to have is moot. Hell, even Steph loves the suspension of hanging off the ledge. Cass doesn't love or hate it; it's just something she does.

It's cold, and he doesn't feel it except for his nose. Bruce's nose is armored, and he wonders if it gets cold. This is something he should know the answer to, but they don't talk that kind of shop, where they bitch about the little things that make their job difficult. In fact, they never bitch about this stuff period, despite that there's plenty to bitch about, or maybe that's why they don't complain. If any of them really had anything to complain to Bruce about, he'd fix it or tell them to buck up and be a good soldier.

He grinds his heel into the brick, waiting for Batman to make a decision about what they do next. The patrol is off because they had to wait. They could pick up here and hit the rest of the warehouse district before skipping into East End and saying hello to Selina. Then they'll slide up into the North Side and check in before swinging back into the satellite space and the car.

Or they could pack in here and go back to the Cave, have a heart-to-heart about whatever people have heart-to-hearts about. Then Tim remembers that Bruce never gave Dick the birds and bees talk as much as he glared for a few days after Dick mentioned a few girls. Then someone, probably Alfred, had arranged for a few books to appear under Dick's pillow.

He knows they'll talk shop once they get back to the Cave to begin with. Bruce is like the co-worker that one only knows bizarre facts about, instead of the guy who raised him, kinda sorta, for a few years, and then continues to foster his addiction to pointy objects and fast vehicles.

Did he and Dick talk? Dick was the only one who ever fell asleep in the Batmobile on the way home in the car. Bruce talks about it out of the side of his mouth, as if he disapproves but finds it endearing at the same time. Jason all but needed the four point harness to keep him in the seat on the way home, something that Bruce also recalls, but not out of the side of his mouth, but softly, and not quite nostalgically.

He wants to ask, about before, about the images he's seen, of Dick from the waist up, the arch of his back, of the time he had watched Bruce place his hand on Dick's shoulder, and it slid up to the nape of the neck, and that wasn't something he understood. He wants to ask if Batman touched Jason that way. He wants to know if he thinks of Tim in ways that he doesn't allow his hands to indulge, and if really, to be honest if it's because he's Tim or because he's Robin.

The cold makes the chest armor harder, and he feels it a little when he lets the wind cut him through the side. He doesn't use the cape the way Batman does. He likes when it's loose, moving around him, making him look much more sinister than he could ever be, or rather, want to be. Tim remembers reading that one should use a coat to make themselves look bigger to scare away mountain lions. He files this away with random fishing facts as he watches Batman grasp one ear of the gargoyle loosely.

"What you've been thinking about," Batman says in a low voice, "is complicated." He masks the lower half of his jaw with one hand, and it's totally intentional, though it's not supposed to seem that way. The wind catches the cape and furls it out in that way that Tim's never manages to do very well. There's a snap of metal fabric slapping against the stone of the gargoyle.

For a second, Tim wonders about Jason, and what all he's inherited, and whether or not the new suit and his living parent makes him exempt from this application of Boy Wonder. Because he's Robin and Batman is Batman doesn't mean much of anything, because Bruce is straighter-laced than a corset.

"Have you ever been fly fishing?" he asks; he makes it a habit to say something completely off the wall to Bruce, to Batman, on the off chance that Bruce is using every bit of dialogue that comes from his mouth to compose a comprehensive log on how to bring him down should he ever need to, despite that he could literally put Tim over his knee and snap him in two. For no reason, he thinks of the image of Batman upside down the night he had donned another mask for the first time, Christmas Eve years ago. That Batman didn't really exist anymore, not really.

Did Dick's Batman still hide in there? Did Jason's? And was he getting the short end of the stick in being denied those ones? Or should he just be content to have Batman Whatever Point Zero, new and improved and lined with kevlar? Didn't Bruce's hard shell make them all harder to kill and easier to keep alive?

"I think, sometimes, that they had the better deal," Tim says, trying not to look at Bruce and doing a great job. "I think, sometimes, no matter how ludicrous it is, that they got the better you."

The snow starts then, the snow he knew had been coming, though when the first flake lands on his lenses and melts into a bead of water he's genuinely surprised.

"It's not a deal," Batman says, hand lowered from his face, though he's still watching the gaggle of pros hustling across the street. "It never was."

Tim watches one of the girls across the street nearly flash a passing car. One of them spots him up on the roof and they giggle and wave. The flasher waves and starts to lift up her shirt. Tim turns from the ledge. The hookers here like doing this to him, as if it's their own personal quest to corrupt the Robin, maybe even firk his cherry. The wall over on the far end of the building is suddenly absolutely entrancing.

"I went fishing with my father," Bruce says finally. "I wasn't very good."

It startles Tim, and he has to look to make sure Bruce is still there, which, for obvious reasons is ridiculous. He wasn't really interested before, and he still isn't.

"I would have thought you'd like that sort of thing," he mumbles because it's a dumb thing to say, but he has to go with the conversation he started, and also because Batman hates it when he mumbles. "It's simple mechanics."

The cape stops flapping when Batman rises, no longer interested in whatever is going on down below. Tim readies his grapple since they still have three square miles of block to cover before he can somehow beg off patrol and make it convincing. Patrolling with Batman tonight isn't what he thought it would be. It never is, and he wonders why he still wants it, still lets his heart race all the way to the city while he's sitting on his side of the car.

"No matter how perfect your cast is, it doesn't mean that you'll catch anything," Bruce tells him. "If you need to catch something, you actually catch it. Otherwise, you should let things live as they are."

Tim knows now, this entire conversation is that kind of coded metaphor that he's had so much of in this life that Tim Drake had earned a perfect score on his last lit test, Buddhist koans and zen haiku, despite that he had hadn't read a single assignment.

They take off from the roof, one of those times when Tim can put himself on auto-pilot, because it's flawless, always has been, this flight with Batman, since it, unlike fly fishing and many other things he's been pondering, can be mastered though the cognizance of mechanics. He allows his mind to wander as far as Mercyhurst when he realizes that they are heading for the car.

Batman would expect Jason to demand why they're gong home early. Dick would ask if he had done something wrong, and then worry about it the whole drive home no matter what Bruce told him. Tim waits, forming several theories and holding for more information before deciding how to act. Most of those plans resemble each other, with variations of order of activity. Right now he favors "shower, Alfred's chai latte, report writing, sleep," though he could also do just as well with "shower, chai latte, sleep, report writing" or "chai latte sleep, shower, sleep and maybe a little more sleep," though he's fairly sure that Bruce would have something to say about that last one, and his hygiene is much better than that.

The car smells like Armor All, electronics and Mountain Fresh Febreeze. Alfred is addicted to the stuff and it gets everywhere. Tim wonders if the first punch Bruce lands every evening smells like a floral bouquet.

"It's early, but the Dragons are the only ones moving, and Batgirl has them," Batman says, flipping switches before he's even seated. "You can skip report and go early if you want."

Tim doesn't answer that because they both know it's as close to a lie as Batman will ever get. It's actually what Tim calls a gimme, something Batman can say because he knows that Tim would never take him up on it. Given extra time in the cave, Tim likes to take apart the Redbird and put it back together, read up on old cases, some of them so old he has to not laugh at the clothes, or use the computer for Titan business; it takes a lot of extra research time to be as prescient as the rest of his team thinks he is, but wiping the smirk off of Kon's face is occasionally very satisfying.

Tim wonders if he really does resemble Batman, already, this soon. Maybe this is why Clark looks at him funny.

"I think if I ever went fishing, I'd want to wear the hip waders," Tim says once he's got the four point harness on, the straps seeming like arms that stretch from shoulder to hip. He yawns once, though he's not tired. In fact, he's a little wired.

"The hip waders slow you down," Bruce says, as if they aren't in this car, aren't wearing masks.

Tim watches him put the car in gear with a little more jerk than usual. Bruce likes the clutch a lot. "But then you're immersed in it. You know, totally out there."

Batman has flipped his lenses down, and Tim is sad that he missed it. He keeps his up, just in case. Just in case of something too much, in case he fucks up the metaphor. He still does that sometimes.

"Did you ever buy donuts for a bunch of cops?" he asks suddenly, making his file in Batman's head one line bigger. They clear the bridge and start the long stretch to Bristol. Batman's mouth quirks and he knows the answer. It's a piece to a bigger puzzle, and he knows that this is the piece of the night.

"You should get your dad to take you fishing," he says finally after removing one gauntlet with his teeth and using the bare fingers to steer. "It builds character."

If Tim had any more character he'd be a social pariah. "It's December. I don't think ice fishing is good with hip waders," he counters, just to that he can keep his mouth on safer things.

The road curves; this is the part that Tim loves because this is the curve he takes at sixty-five whenever he gets the chance to, meaning no one can see him and Oracle isn't monitoring his speed. She probably has an alarm that sounds every time the goes over sixty-three.

Bruce does that snort thing he does which means he understands but has nothing to say. Tim stares out the window, the leans his head against the window, knowing that he'll leave a grimy print, and that's okay with him for more reasons than one. The engine revs over seventy for the turn and they fishtail enough to make Tim tense one leg and roll his eyes. He bet Oracle didn't have a sensor on the Batmobile.

"The snow is sticking," Batman grumbles," and Tim knows that he's totally lying.

"Maybe we should take Dick fishing," he says absently, not knowing where that came from.

Bruce grips the wheel with both hands now instead of just one. "Maybe we should," he says through his teeth. Bruce wants to go fast, but the snow is slick and slushy under the wheels, and he can't take the access road at eighty like he wants. Bruce's addiction to speed is just another reason Tim is sure he's Batman-in-waiting, and not just Mr.-I-Can-Quit-When-I-Like. What Tim thinks he knows about the separation between Bruce and Batman smears at the edges, a faded charcoal painting with too many fingers on it, but he's not the first person to make this comparison, or something akin to it. He is the only person to ever compare Batman to anything with shades of gray.

He is the only person he's met so far who's wondered just what Robin needs to be to this Batman, what he represents, and when he should take one of his own gloves off and reach across the console. But he's all there is at the moment, so he'd better make it good.

END

**Author's Note:**

> I totally cribbed the bit about HMS Pinafore and duty from the West Wing, though that's not really what they said. I just like the idea.


End file.
